Monotype left Fontworks mostly alone for two years after their acquisition but then it all started going downhill pretty rapidly earlier this year.

Monotype has been run by private for years and has a history of buying foundries for their IP before hollowing them out and firing all their staff.
I saw this coming when they announced their acquisition of Fontworks but sadly many in the industry in Japan took a more naïve view of things.

They’ve been controlled by a private equity firm since 2019 and this has resulted in them buying up foundries left and right to extract value in any way they can from the mass of IP they’ve come to own.

I think a lot of people in Japan took a naïve approach to Monotype - especially when the company claimed that they would leave Fontworks to do its own thing. I saw right through that. I felt bad when I said “told you so” to people here.

Next step is the hollowing out of Fontworks’ staff.

This story ends up echoing somewhat in a later part of the series when House ends up in prison and is made to work as a prison janitor, where he attempts to advise/intervene in cases in the prison clinic/sick bay while on cleaning duties.

Don’t compare me to that guy 😝

The four certified are Ozaki Tsuyoshi, Kaizawa Toru, Suzaki Haruo and Takano Shigehiro.

I feel privileged to have spent time with Nibutani's artisans. Especially Kaizawa Toru whom I usually visit each time I go to the kotan. Takano-san also played a little bit of tonkori for my parents in April.

I'm glad that you appreciate what I put out!
Honestly this site hasn't been too much of an issue because I only really open it up to post. I'm still stuck with opening Twitter a lot. Going to try and reduce my usage of that site in the coming year.

Especially with AI usage increasing, fighting against the horde of slop seems like an increasingly uphill battle.
I still want to share stuff about what I’m doing/the fields I’m active in as well as things that interest me, but I don’t know what form that’ll begin to take.
Maybe focus more on videos

They wrote in Arabic and then English because they were trying to be polite with accomodating another language but I just replied that Japanese is fine, because you know... I live and work here lol
They were fine with that once I told them

I think there was an English language podcast about Godzilla which brought up Ifukube’s interaction with Ainu - ill have to see if I can find it when I get home.
After meeting with Ushijima-san I started writing a piece about it myself but I haven’t got around to finishing it yet 😅

Key giveaway for me that someone has tried to use a machine to translate from Japanese to Arabic is that it always seems to switch the “nothing phrase” of よろしくお願いします into “شكرا لك” (polite way of saying thanks) regardless of the context.

(Kindly sent to me by my parents back in Scotland - hence the filming of the TV. They're not great with technology but they tried!)